


sour candy

by natesfangs (golden_we)



Category: The Wayhaven Chronicles (Interactive Fiction)
Genre: (no violence happens onscreen i'm just being careful), Abrupt Ending, Anxiety, Blood, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, References to Depression, a very slight spoiler for the book three demo but it really is squint and you'll miss it, destruction of the physical as an allegory for mental health? yeah
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-23
Updated: 2020-09-23
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:55:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26606362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/golden_we/pseuds/natesfangs
Summary: the detective makes mason tea.
Relationships: Detective/Mason (The Wayhaven Chronicles), Female Detective/Mason (The Wayhaven Chronicles)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 38





	sour candy

There’s blood on Mason’s face. 

It’s a furious spray of dark red that cradles his right eye; flecks of it dot the expanse beneath his brow, a spilled-wine stain on his skin that hides the freckles that flit across the high points of his features, a dried-down drip that runs down his cheek from a cut that healed before she could see it but left enough blood behind for her to know it had existed at all. 

She hadn’t noticed before — his freckles are darker, from the last hours of the season, burned into him by the summer sun. She is so close to him she could count them, distinguishing them from the similarly shaped marks the blood has made on him. One by one. Her fingertips brushing up against the boundary at the edge of his jaw, thumbs sweeping beneath his eyes, cupping the sides of his face, avoiding the phantom injury he must have bled from to be so streaked with it — a wound which exists only because he knows her. 

Mason is meant to be the dangerous one, between them.

He’s looking up at her through his lashes from his perch on the remaining chair, chin held in place between Mina’s palms as she stands between his open legs and turns his head to one side, examining him in silence. The slope of his throat is clean. His lips are parted slightly. His dark hair fell loosely down, a pattern like water, when he tipped his head back and allowed her to take it in her hands, but a few strands of it lay unmoved at his temples. He smells like tobacco smoke and adrenaline.

He told her before — there’s nothing. He’s healed already. 

But something about his face — the muscles of his clenched jaw, the bridge of his nose, the hollows made by his cheekbones, the blood itself, maybe — is compelling. It demands to be touched. 

She likes privately succumbing to his demands.

“Satisfied?” 

Mason speaks to her palm, his lips pressed to it, his glance heavy-lidded. The word itself is a low murmur that hums against Mina’s bare skin, setting a trembling pace for her pulse. She’s still shaking, her fingers moving almost imperceptibly against his bloodied cheeks.

She knows Mason feels it — he feels everything — but he doesn’t say anything else, looking at her with a dishevelled intensity, grey eyes flashing like molten silver and fixed on hers. It’s the same way he looks at her at the end of a hungry, open-mouthed kiss — a look of volatility to match her wounded-doe-that-doesn’t-understand-its-mortality eyes, that gaze that feels like being devoured.

One of his hands rises between them, long fingers wrapping themselves around her wrist, his thumb tracing a slow line down it.

She looks away first, stiffening, her arms rigid at her sides again, hands trembling against her thighs instead of his sensitive skin.

“I’ll make tea,” Mina says, staring past Mason’s bloodied face and into the kitchen.

The kettle is where she left it.

On the counter — its plug nearly coiled around it — surrounded by a debris field of splintered wood and broken glass, the rest of the room in ruins. Strange, the things that survived the destruction intended for her — she is uncertain of whether she’ll have cups for the tea, or tea itself, but she has a kettle — and he occupies the only seat that was spared, the fabric beneath him torn in places, but not beyond repair, like the rest of her things. It seems purposeful, cruel hauntings to keep her awake, wondering if they would look at her and spare her too.

The space between his thighs widens without Mina occupying it. She wants to be back inside of it immediately — cradling his face in her hands and bearing the immense weight of his accumulating favours to her — they were favours, that he let her examine him in the aftermath, that he stayed at all, that he didn’t say anything about the way she was shaking, the kiss he offered her palm when he couldn’t reach her mouth — instead of wandering her apartment in this state. The Agency has no ability to return from something like this. They’ll have only an excuse — a fault in the wiring. A gas leak. Age and improper maintenance. All of those things.

A shame, that Wayhaven’s human liason’s building would be left in ruins to something human and preventable like that with a Trapper bounty on her head. A shame, that she has lost everything. A shame, a terrible shame, a cruel twist of fate, she should be ashamed.

She didn’t say anything about the blood on Mason’s face, she realises. 

Only — tea.

The damage is extensive. There’s a chipped cup in the sink. She’ll have to clean it before she lets him drink from it. The sink itself is broken. The hinges on one of the cabinets with a door have broken and it dangles precariously just left of her head.

Mina balls her hands into fists, clutching the splintered counter, and wills herself not to do anything else that betrays her with the vampire so close — sob. Or — scream.

“You don’t have to make tea.”

There’s a cigarette from the metallic case that matches his steely eyes — she doesn’t know where he keeps it, but it never leaves his side — held between two of his fingers, but it isn’t lit. She would let him light it — take a drag from it herself, even, warmed by the fiery glow of it, if only for a second. There’s nothing left in her apartment to be ruined by fallen ash and stray curls of smoke.

“I have to,” she says.

Mason watches her with narrowed eyes. She finds a box of black tea — dust-covered, dirtied, in the pantry, its floor slick with things spilled from the broken bottles whose shards sparkle among the pools of oil and pickling vinegar.

Nothing in her fridge — or her fridge itself — is worthy of salvage.

The outlets in the kitchen are all broken, but there must be one that is still useable somewhere else in the apartment — one that she can plug the electric kettle into, use to heat the water that comes in a slow trickle from the ruined tap, put the teabag in the cup she’ll clean, pour the water from the tap she heated in the kettle she plugged into a working outlet, make him tea —

“Why?”

Mina stills. “I have to,” she says, repeating herself emphatically, her voice raising, “I have to. When something bad happens — you — you make tea — so I have to. I have to. I have to make tea. I have to make tea for you.”

“No. You don’t have to.”

Her throat closes around the sharpness of his tone, struggling to swallow his words down.

“I want to. I want to.”

“Do you?”

She looks up, startled.

She’s always thought of the grey shade of his gaze as violent — the blade of a knife, gathered storm clouds, pallor and sickness — but the look he gives her is something else now. Something both soft and unyielding — water. A grey sea flacked with foam, treacherous and beloved. And Mina knows she is staring at him instead of answering, fixated, mesmerised, but — he’s never looked at her like that before.

“Mina.”

Mason says her name so rarely that the sound of it is foreign in his mouth, the syllables strangely elongated, reverberating in the small space that remains between them as Mason approaches, standing down, his arms at his sides.

He brushes against her in increments, bone of his wrist against the bone of hers, a strand of her hair held between the ends of two of his fingers, palm on her jaw like hers rested on his, stroking the vertebrae at the nape of her neck and tangling with the sweat-dampened locks there. She knows him to be ravenous, a creature not easily sated by small things — now, she is the smallest thing, robbed of twenty six years of her possessions, of everything material she has ever cared for and the immaterial reason why she is shaking beneath him, they have stripped her of the feeling of invincibility and impenetrability she tried so hard to curate here — but he stands quietly, stretched towards her, cradling her face between his hands, the red on him blurred as she blinks. 

“You don’t have to,” Mason says, lips grazing her forehead, “You’ve done enough.”

His thumb moves quickly, across her cheek, towards the edge of her ear, before his hand curls around the back of her head. She turns her cheek instinctively as he pulls her to his chest, grasping at the fabric of his jacket, her eyes still open and staring at the glass shards glittering in the distance as he holds her. 

It’s quiet. She’s forgotten how to swallow, something in her chest seizing.

“Don’t leave.” Mina’s voice breaks on the last syllable, and she says it almost entirely to the material at her lips as she breathes him in, the sound muffled.

“Fuck, I’m not.” 

The brusque irritation in it should sting; his tone is pointed, arrow-aimed straight at her. Instead — she sinks into it, clinging to his chest and that something real, reliable — that Mason is, by nature, sharp, that the way he looked at her before he embraced her, and those words he said as though they were part of a conversation neither of them will remember except vaguely and not the cruelest, kindest thing he’s ever said to her, ‘you’ve done enough’, has not changed that. 

She reaches deeper into him, her hands shaking violently. 

“I don’t want to die.”

“That’s not going to happen.” The rest of the sentence dangles in midair, an implication that makes Mina lift her head to look at him. 

He's not going to let that happen.

**Author's Note:**

> this will be quite long and if you have no interest in my personal life or are triggered by mentions of anxiety / depression / panic attacks it will be of no interest or could be harmful to you; thank you for reading this fic and for your kudos and comments.
> 
> i read something recently that suggested authors are obligated to reply to comments on their fics to create a safe space for their readers, and it’s been weighing on me, so i want to apologise for not having done so — i have my reasons / excuses, mostly that i am shy and quickly convinced of my insignificance rather than that i am ungrateful and aloof (i really hope none of you think i am ungrateful and aloof), but i want to acknowledge my gratitude for your comments here, at the very least. i try to reciprocate in other ways, when i can, but i know that often that is not enough.
> 
> i hope if you have things to say about my writing you will feel comfortable doing so, and please know that i will be infinitely appreciative of literally anything you have to say 💕 (especially because i struggle with writing mason's character and welcome any critique)
> 
> as i alluded to in the last note of my (deleted) most recent fic, i struggle with depression. i also have debilitating anxiety, and a learning disorder that makes reading and writing way too hard sometimes. in late august i had a mental health emergency and in the time since i just haven’t known how to exist or what to do with myself. this fic was actually meant to be much longer, but lately i've been having to cut down my fics because i start having panic attacks about them.
> 
> these things are hard and weird to talk about with strangers because as a writer / persona / entity / stranger-to-you, i don’t want to be alienating instead of relatable. i don’t know how to be honest enough without being too honest; likeable and charming instead of someone you do not want to know more about or whose works you don’t want to read. so i am reluctant to say that i’m dealing with a lot right now, but it leeches into everything i do, it’s the only thing i can think about and the only thing i want to talk about, and it affects my work and how i feel about it. 
> 
> what i want to say is that at the moment, the sole place i feel seen, the sole place i feel like my true self, is my writing, so thank you for reading this and thank you for seeing me 💕


End file.
